A01=Julie A. Cassiday
Author_Julie A. Cassiday
Category=ATXB
Category=JBCC1
Category=JBSF
Category=JPFC
Category=JPFF
Category=NHD
cultural protest
drag
drag queens
embodied citizenship
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
femininity
feminism
gender
gender performance
gender studies
heteronormativity
homophobia
hypergender
LGBTQ
masculinity
misogyny
performing citizenship
popular culture
post-feminism
post-Soviet
Putinism
queer
queer studies
Russia
Russian culture
Russian identity
Russian politics
sexual politics
style
transphobia
travesti
Vladimir Putin
Product details
- ISBN 9780299346744
- Weight: 367g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 10 Jun 2025
- Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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As the West liberalized its stance on sexuality and gender between 2000 and 2020, Vladimir Putin’s Russia moved in the opposite direction, remolding the performance of Russian citizenship according to a neoconservative agenda characterized by increasingly exaggerated gender roles. By connecting gendered and sexualized citizenship to developments in Russian popular culture, Julie A. Cassiday argues that heteronormativity and homophobia became a kind of politicized style under Putin’s leadership. However, the multiple modes of gender performativity simultaneously helped citizens resist and protest the state’s mandate of heteronormativity. Examining everything from memes to the Eurovision Song Contest and self-help literature, Cassiday untangles the discourse of gender to argue that drag, or travesti, became the performative trope par excellence in Putin’s Russia. Provocatively, Cassiday further argues that the exaggerated expressions of gender demanded by Putin’s regime are best understood as a form of cisgender drag. This smart and lively study provides critical, nuanced analysis of the relationship between popular culture and politics in Russia during Putin’s first two decades in power.
Julie A. Cassiday is the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian at Williams College. She is the author of The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen and the coeditor of Russian Performances: Word, Object, Action.
